Passionate about Communities (Midland Heart Housing)

Kevin Gulliver

This short history traces the origins of
Midland Heart to the 1920s when, as Copec, it first became ‘passionate about
communities’, improving slum housing in Birmingham and campaigning for
clearance. The history portrays developments in the inter-war period and beyond
into the 1950s and 1960s, when a range of other housing associations - Coventry
Churches HA, Midland Area HA, Wolverhampton HA, and Birmingham Housing Trust,
were created as part of the response to the Shelter homeless campaign.

The book then depicts how these
associations, alongside others created in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Normid,
Shape, Harambee/Black Star and HAMAC, went through a series of mergers to
create two large housing association groupings - Keynote based in Coventry and
Prime Focus in Birmingham - that met changing community needs and increasing
stakeholder expectations through innovation and promoting diversity of
provision. These two groups came together to form Midland Heart in April 2006.

Eighty years on, the book describes how
Midland Heart was created as a major social business, managing 32,000 homes
with a value of £1.1 billion. It shows how Midland Heart is not only an
historical product of like-minded organisations long in the making, but also a
new and energetic organisation that is planning ambitiously for its next eighty
years - Midland Heart is developing 2,000 new homes, investing an extra £10
million in the Midlands’ most disadvantaged communities, increasing customer
satisfaction, and integrating its multi-million neighbourhood services. Midland
Heart is still ‘passionate about communities’, supporting ambition, encouraging
imagination, putting customers first, empowering people and communities, and
promoting inclusiveness across the Midlands region.